The United States and France have a long and storied love-hate relationship, and enjoy a reciprocal fascination. Their similarities are fundamental and historic: They are the birthplaces of twin revolutions that shook the world, and both lands went through explicit re-foundings based on universalist Enlightenment ideals. Their differences are no less profound. One country is Anglo-Puritan, the other Latin-Catholic; one, an expansive upstart conglomeration of immigrants, the other boasting a history and people that stretch back to the Roman Empire. The French and the Americans have tended to see in each other a kind of fun-house mirror. Ever since Chateaubriand and Tocqueville toured the United States and Benjamin Franklin lived in Paris, the two countries have used each other, with great intellectual profit, as a means of national comparison.

In recent decades, the focus of this mutual study has been economic: France has long been considered an exemplar of European social democracy, and America a beacon of capitalism. But as the United States has expanded and centralized its federal government, particularly during the presidency of Barack Obama, many observers have stopped talking about the two economies as cartoonish opposites. Instead, a new question has emerged: Is America, at last, becoming France?

As a Frenchman engaged in the national pastime of America-watching, I offer my considered response: Yes, the United States is, not irreversibly but steadily, turning into France. But this transformation is political only in part. Its more significant dimension is cultural. Ultimately, what sets France apart is not that it is a statist society. After all, many countries have high taxes and intrusive regulations. France is unique, rather, because it is a status society. And in this regard, American culture is heading unmistakably Frenchward.

In France, what ultimately defines a man’s worth is that he have some official status, whether it’s conferred by a degree from a prestigious institution, a secure civil-service job, a protected economic rent (an extra sum earned from the use of or access to a resource), or even a taxi medallion. Big government therefore becomes necessary not as an end in itself but because it distributes the rents to its subjects—and gives handouts to those who are left behind, lest they upset the apple cart, as has happened a few times in our history. Additionally, a free market must be limited to the degree that it threatens status. Thus the state becomes, in the 19th-century liberal philosopher Frederic Bastiat’s terrible phrase, a “fiction by which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else.”

This is the legacy of the French monarchy. When the bourgeois revolution began in the 17th century in the Low Countries and in Great Britain, France was under the reign of the absolute Sun King, Louis XIV. His government realized that the technological superiority of other nations in manufacturing was imperiling his own capacity to wage war and fill state coffers, so he did the only thing that he could: He created a government program. His minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, set out to create a French manufacturing base by raising tariffs and using the public purse to build manufacturing sites and other public works.

The very word corporatism comes from Colbert’s own policies: He built the economy on corporations, which functioned like powerful cartels. Each industry was dominated by a corporation of handpicked manufacturers who had control of their sector, and each was protected from foreign markets by tariffs and was also under the heel of draconian regulations.

Today’s French business and economic elites are modified versions of their Colbertiste progenitors. There is a “deep state” of alumni of France’s civil-service school, ENA, who move between jobs in government and the country’s biggest companies. France’s largest bank, its largest telecommunications company, its biggest utility company, and many large industrial companies are run by former high-level civil servants. The problem with the French economic system is not to be found in its regulations or tax-and-spend schemes, but in the fundamental belief, ingrained in almost every French economic actor, that at the end of the day the master conductor of the economy is the state. So long as the state conducts, the people play what’s in front of them, and the concert continues.

The United States is headed down a similar path. The list of business and industrial sectors under direct or indirect government control is growing. Where once there was only a military-industrial complex to fear, today such complexes are in abundance. The government is deeply invested in everything, from the automobile industry to the energy sector, to big finance, to health care.

As in France, the primary danger is not the size of government spending as a percentage of GDP, the size of the Federal rulebook, or the level of taxation. The larger, more irreversible threat is that America is slowly becoming a kind of aristocratic society, in which success and status are attained not through merit but by the favor of the sovereign. The federal government’s throwing of more than a half billion dollars into the bankrupt-bound solar-panel company Solyndra was not only a financial travesty (and a scientific and technological humiliation). It was also, and remains, a check on America’s historically unique potential for human progress. When the royal court bestows outsized gifts upon only those industries and parties that fit its definition of virtue—in this case, giving huge sums to green-energy insiders—then meritorious achievers of no official status suffer. And as the government’s definition of virtue becomes institutionalized via laws, “czars,” and all manner of executive action, the status system is made permanent and self-reinforcing. Louis XIV would be impressed.

For their part, the beneficiaries protect the integrity of the status structure through a massive lobbying body that itself constitutes a kind of elbow-rubbing aristocracy. A little-noticed house advertisement on Bloomberg television sums things up nicely. The station boasts that its anchors have “access” to “Wall Street, K Street, and the world”—K Street being the center of Washington lobbying efforts. Evidently, the idea that Wall Street and K Street drive the U.S. economy is not a scandalous proposition, but an accepted fact.

And so achieving favored status becomes a necessary corporate goal. In October 2012, ABC News reported that the White House successfully leaned on Lockheed Martin to delay scheduled layoff announcements (required by the recently passed Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) until after the presidential election so that Obama’s record on job growth would not needlessly suffer. The headline—“At White House Request, Lockheed Martin Drops Plan to Issue Layoff Notices”—practically treats the president as part of the company’s corporate structure. Lockheed’s largest client is in fact the Pentagon, and only in a corporatist economy, with a calcified public-private nexus, would such pressure tactics be conceivable. Naturally enough, this story mirrors French reports that Nicolas Sarkozy publicly “summoned” the CEOs of energy company Areva and automaker PSA after they announced layoffs during his presidential campaigns, and a union leader claimed that senior management of large companies received weekly phone calls from the president’s office urging them to delay layoffs.

American Francification was accelerated by the 2008 financial crisis and its resultant recession. In fact, the “new normal” that many now talk about in America has been the old normal for quite some time in France. Low economic growth leads to increased unemployment, which leads back to low growth. Such stagnation means increased public debt, as the main variable affecting the deficit is economic growth. Low growth is also a boon to crony capitalism because the government tries initiative after (failed) initiative to kick-start the economy, and businesses, unable to find growth in the marketplace, appeal to the state to fill shareholders’ wallets. These are all hallmarks of France’s political economy.

American demographic trends are also looking rather French these days. In France and now the United States, population growth has slowed and birth rates have dropped below replacement levels. With the American fertility rate at 1.93 (babies per female) and the replacement rate at 2.1, the workforce is due to shrink. As Baby Boomers head into retirement, pension systems will be greatly strained since there is not enough human capital to keep them afloat. Meeting the needs of the aging Boomer population means redistributing public resources—that is, taking from the young and giving to the old. Public care of the elderly is difficult ethical terrain to negotiate, but the plain fact is that another limit is being placed on American potential so that the status of a preferred group is protected.

Funneling resources away from the young could not come at a worse time. Now in America, as has long been the case in France, youths are facing a bleak professional forecast, and more and more are living with their parents in an extended adolescence. The mechanics of each country’s youth crisis are different, but they both owe a large debt to the increased premium placed on the credential as an official mark of status. In this case, the credential is the academic degree.

In France, a white-collar job is almost unthinkable without a master’s degree. This takes five years of study after the end of secondary education. But because public universities are not allowed to practice selective admissions, they are overcrowded and poorly run. Owing to such conditions, most students simply find it necessary to repeat one or more years of their education. The grandes écoles operate outside the official French education system and are better run. But degrees are delayed there because most curricula include a mandatory year of interning. Further, many students take the competitive annual entrance exams to the écoles more than once—a recipe for waiting in an even longer state of semi-aimlessness.

And then, once a French youth obtains a degree, he finds jobs hard to come by. The overall French labor market is depressed, but particularly so for the young. Graduates spend a very long time searching for a job while trying to make ends meet. They typically pad their résumés with superfluous degrees (after all, university is free) and internships, chasing the holy grail of the steady job and its strong legal protections and benefits. This zero-sum arms race becomes self-reinforcing: If every person applying for an entry-level job has three master’s degrees, students with only one will need to get more.

Meanwhile, given enormous legal restrictions on construction and renting, French youth find most housing unaffordable. All of this means that in France, at any given point there is a “lost generation” of twentysomething perpetual students, still in their childhood homes and stuck in a limbo of internships, odd jobs, and questionable graduate study. Here again, the French status system rears its head. A middle-aged person’s status depends on his owning profitable land, and therefore he resists free-market policies that might depreciate his property. As a result, Paris real estate is among the most (artificially) expensive in the world.

The American problem is more straightforward. In the United States, higher education is simply becoming too expensive. Students graduate with ever-more crushing burdens of debt only to find that the Great Recession and the information economy have devalued their degrees. Stories of out-of-work graduates moving back in with their parents are now legion. ObamaCare supports this stultification by allowing children to be covered by their parents’ health insurance until their 26th birthday. Today’s children will stay dependent on their parents for much longer than will have any previous generation. This is hardly the American way—and it’s certainly reminiscent of France.

The French credential culture has long held sway. In published writing, educational pedigrees usually come right after bylines. When François Hollande was elected president, the front-page headline of Le Monde, the newspaper of record, described it as a victory for his prestigious alma mater, Hautes études commerciales de Paris, seen as now dominating French politics and business (Disclosure: It is also my alma mater.) And given how much has been said about the fact that graduates of the senior civil-service school École nationale d’administration (ENA) hold all the key levers of French society, it’s worth noting that Hollande is also an ENA graduate, bien sûr.

In the United States, such pure credential-worship is new. One of the most disturbing features of the Cult of Obama that gripped the nation’s elite early on was the notion that being president of the Harvard Law Review was a particularly strong qualification for being president of the United States of America. Of course, the Ivy League has always had a strong grasp on the American imagination, and in previous eras the situation was in many ways much worse than it is today. But in its unique fashion, America always had a way of transcending boundaries imposed by things like degrees. Just imagine the odds of a man like Harry Truman getting into the White House today without completing college. It’s doubtful he could have made it into the Senate.

The higher education system has become very efficient at sifting and sorting high-school graduates by IQ (using SAT scores by proxy), and the most prominent institutions that pride themselves on hiring the smartest people, such as consulting firms and investment banks, recruit at only a small number of schools. With the pressures of the globalized economy and the now-questionable value of a middle-of-the-road B.A., the race for spots at the top has intensified in a way never seen before. (And because this race is so intense, an elite-school B.A. is no longer enough: More and more people get graduate degrees they don’t need, just because everyone else is doing it, just as in France.)

In large part, the collective faith in credentials is behind enormous government failures such as the ObamaCare rollout: The technocrats who currently run the country are so sure of their competence that they couldn’t imagine being blindsided by ordinary technical problems.

As the HealthCare.gov fiasco shows, in the end, status culture and statist culture tend to converge once the elites close ranks. Tocqueville was most enthusiastic about American democracy, but he was not deluded about its potential dangers. Among them, he noted, was a propensity for the overconfidence that comes with success. Once such overconfidence manifests itself, further successes become more rare. Such is the threat that America now lives under.

Failure, on the other hand, is a great inducement to change. Fittingly, if Americans now take a peek in the fun-house mirror of France, they might pick up on something curious: budding, perhaps cosmetic, signs of Americanization. Hollande recently announced his intention to cut taxes and cut spending as a way of reviving the French economy. If the cuts are real, and not symbolic as many believe, they could begin to threaten the system that has made French status culture a sclerotic political reality. May he stay true to his word, and may Americans and the French keep looking across the ocean to learn about themselves—especially by noting each other’s mistakes.

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Much hasbeenwritten here at COMMENTARY about Harvard’s ill-conceived war on “unrecognized single-gender organizations.” At issue are fraternities, sororities, and Harvard’s famously exclusive “finals clubs.” All of these groups already lack official status at Harvard, but starting with the class of 2021, Harvard promises to punish anyone who dares to join one. Such heretics “will not be permitted to hold leadership positions in recognized student organizations or on athletic teams.” They will also “not be eligible for letters of recommendation” from the Dean’s office for scholarships, including the prestigious Rhodes and Marshall, that require such a recommendation. In the name of inclusion, they must be excluded.

As Harvard explained, “the final clubs, in particular, are a product of another era, a time when Harvard’s student body was all male, culturally homogeneous, and overwhelmingly white and affluent.” Which is why—I wish I were kidding—sororities must be destroyed. On August 5th, Harvard’s chapter of Delta Gamma sorority announced that it would shut down. Wilma Johnson Wilbanks, president of Delta Gamma’s national organization, said that Harvard’s new policy “resulted in an environment in which Delta Gamma could not thrive.”

Harvard has gamely asserted that the sororities are part of the same ancient culture of privilege and exclusion as the finals clubs. And sororities play a minor role—the main villains are the “deeply misogynistic” all-male finals clubs—in the 2016 report on sexual assault at Harvard that launched the push for the new policy. But Harvard’s Delta Gamma chapter, founded in 1994, is an unintended casualty of a policy designed to crush all-male clubs. Harvard had initially planned to allow female-only clubs to remain “gender-focused” for five years after the new policy went into effect. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a critic of the new policy, pointed out, such special treatment probably would have violated Title IX, a civil rights law that governs campuses that receive federal funding.

The relevant section of Title IX reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Title IX would seem to prevent Harvard from punishing men for belonging to all-male fraternities if it does not also punish women for belonging to all-female sororities.

Although one cannot prove that a lawyer whispered in Harvard’s ear, this Title IX problem may well explain why Harvard quietly dropped the five year grace period for sororities. But it might also explain why sororities were dragged into the new policy in the first place. If Harvard had gone to war solely with all-male clubs, its lawyers would have had the hard task of explaining why, under Title IX, a university can “decide that women’s groups can exist but men’s cannot.”

To win its war against misogyny, Harvard had to sacrifice sisterhood.

After all, Harvard’s justification for attacking single-sex organizations made liberal use of the term “diversity.” The university undoubtedly sympathized with the protesters who, reading out of the diversity playbook, insisted that all-women organizations are “safe spaces” for women. “Change is hard,” they said. What they meant was: “if we want to protect women we’ll need to take away their freedom of association.”

If you want to make a social justice omelet, you have to break some eggs.

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When President Donald Trump first floated the idea of creating an entirely new branch of the United States armed forces dedicated to space-based operations in March, the response from lay political observers was limited to bemused snickering. That mockery and amusement have not abated in the intervening months. Thursday’s announcement by Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, that the administration plans to establish a sixth armed forces branch by 2020, occasioned only more displays of cynicism, but it shouldn’t have. This is deadly serious stuff. The expansion and consolidation of America’s capacities to defend its interests outside the atmosphere is inevitable and desirable.

Though you would not know it from those who spent the day chuckling to themselves over the prospect of an American space command, the militarization of this strategically vital region is decades old. Thousands of both civilian and military communications and navigations satellites operate in earth orbit, to say nothing of the occasional human. It’s impossible to say how many weapons are already stationed in orbit because many of these platforms are “dual use,” meaning that they could be transformed into kill vehicles at a moment’s notice.

American military planners have been preoccupied with the preservation of critical U.S. communications infrastructure in space since at least 2007, when China stunned observers by launching a missile that intercepted and destroyed a satellite, creating thousands of pieces of debris hurtling around the earth at speeds faster than any bullet.

America’s chief strategic competitors—Russia and China—and rogue actors like Iran and North Korea are all committed to developing the capability to target America’s command-and-control infrastructure, a lot of which is space-based. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats testified in 2017 that both Moscow and Beijing are “considering attacks against satellite systems as part of their future warfare doctrine” and are developing the requisite anti-satellite technology—despite their false public commitments to the “nonweaponization of space and ‘no first placement’ of weapons in space.”

Those who oppose the creation of a space branch object on a variety of grounds, some of them merit more attention than others. The contention that a sixth military branch is a redundant waste of taxpayer money, for example, is a more salient than cynical claims that Trump is interested only in a glory project.

“I oppose the creation of a new military service and additional organizational layers at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint warfighting functions,” Sec. Mattis wrote in October of last year. That’s a perfectly sound argument against excessive bureaucratization and profligacy, but it is silent on the necessity of a space command. Both the Pentagon and the National Security Council are behind the creation of a “U.S. Space Command” in lieu of the congressional action required to establish a new branch of the armed forces dedicated to space-based operations.

As for bureaucratic sprawl, in 2015, the diffusion of space-related experts and capabilities across the armed services led the Air Force to create a single space advisor to coordinate those capabilities for the Defense Department. But that patch did not resolve the problems and, in 2017, Congress’s General Accountability Office recommended investigating the creation of a single branch dedicated to space for the purposes of consolidation.

It is true that the existing branches maintain capabilities that extend into space, which would superficially make a Space Force seem redundant. But American air power was once the province of the U.S. Army and Navy, and bureaucratic elements within these two branches opposed the creation of a U.S. Air Force in 1947. The importance of air power in World War II and the likelihood that aircraft would be a critical feature of future warfighting convinced policymakers that a unified command of operations was critical to effective warfighting. Moreover, both Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman believed that creating a separate branch for airpower ensured that Congress would be less likely to underfund the vital enterprise.

The final argument against the militarization of space is a rehash of themes from the Cold War. Low earth orbit, like the seafloor and the Antarctic, is part of the “global commons,” and should not be militarized on principle. This was the Soviet position, and Moscow’s fellow travelers in the West regularly echoed it. But the argument is simply not compelling.

The Soviets insisted that the militarization of space was provocative and undesirable, but mostly because they lacked the capability to weaponize space. The Soviets regularly argued that any technology it could not match was a first-strike weapon. That’s why they argued vigorously against deploying missile interceptors but voiced fewer objections to ground-based laser technology. As for the “global commons,” that’s just what we call the places where humans do not operate for extended periods of time and where resource extraction is cost prohibitive. The more viable the exploration of these hostile environments becomes, the less “common” we will eventually consider them.

Just as navies police sea lanes, the inevitable commercialization of space ensures that its militarization will follow. That isn’t something to fear or lament. It’s not only unavoidable; it’s a civilizational advance. Space Force may not be an idea whose time has come, but deterrence is based on supremacy and supremacy is the product of proactivity. God forbid there comes a day on which we need an integrated response to a state actor with capabilities in space, we will be glad that we didn’t wait for the crisis before resolving to do what is necessary.

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Chicken Little has always been the press secretary of the environmental movement.

In the 1960’s there was good reason to think the sky was actually falling. The New Yorker published a cartoon showing a wife standing by a table set for lunch in the backyard of a brownstone. “Hurry darling,” she calls to her husband, “Your soup’s getting dirty.” In 1969, the Cuyahoga River that runs through Cleveland was so polluted that it caught fire, not for the first time.

But in 1970, Earth Day was established. It was one of the most remarkable examples of grassroots activism in American history, involving fully 10 percent of the population. Late that year, Congress, at the behest of the Nixon Administration, established the Environmental Protection Agency. A series of acts requiring pollution controls and abatement followed, and the great American clean up began.

How has it worked out? As Investor’s Business Dailyreports, the clean up has been a howling success. From 1990 to 2017, the six major air pollutants monitored by the EPA plunged by 73 percent from levels that were already well below 1970 levels. By comparison, during that time, the U.S. economy grew 262 percent and its population expanded by 60 percent. And by 1990, much progress had already been made. Banning lead in gasoline, where it was used as an antiknock agent, beginning in the 1980’s had already greatly reduced the level of atmospheric lead, reducing, in turn, the level found in blood. It is down 98 percent from 1980.

Water pollution has plunged as well, as sewage treatment plants came online. In 1970, Manhattan discharged the sewage of 1.5 million people into the surrounding waterways. Today, there is an annual swimming race around Manhattan. There is even talk of a beach for Manhattan Island, the only borough of New York City without one. This sort of improvement has been duplicated across the country. The Connecticut River, once a 400-mile sewer, is now safe for fishing and swimming along its entire length. Even the Cuyahoga is in much better shape, with riverside cafés looking out over blue water instead of rafts of sludge.

And yet this good news can be hard to find. Government agencies usually are not shy about tooting their own horns when they have success to report. But the pollution history on the EPA’s website is hard to find. And the websites of such organizations as the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council, are still in full the-sky-is-falling mode. I suspect the reason for that has more to do with fundraising strategy than the actual state of the environment.

And even that bugbear of the environmentalist movement, the country’s output of CO2, has fallen 29 percent since it peaked in 2007. That’s thanks largely to the switchover from coal to natural gas as fracking has greatly increased the supply and, thus, lowered the price. Trumpeting that statistic, of course, would not advance the cause of what used to be called “global warming,” and is now called “climate change.”

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We decided to do our version of The Handmaid’s Tale and try to imagine the world in 2019 from two perspectives: One in which Democrats fail to win the House of Representatives in November and the other in which Democrats win handily. What will they do in each case? What will Republicans do? Give a listen.

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In November 1995, COMMENTARY published a symposium called “The National Prospect” in which dozens of writers offered their view of America’s possible future. I just went and looked at my entry in that symposium, which I had not thought of in years, because of Laura Ingraham’s statement on TV last night that “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like … this is related to both illegal and legal immigration.”

What my symposium entry indicates is that views like hers have been percolating on the Right for decades. I thought you might find it interesting to read:

***

“This is not the country my father fought for,” a one-time colleague who grew up as an Army brat was telling me over lunch five years ago. He sang a threnody of national faults, and I could only hang my head in mute agreement—crime, multiculturalism, educational collapse, everything conservatives have worried over and fought against for twenty years or more.

He grew more and more excited. From multiculturalism, he began talking about the threat posed by immigrants, and from that threat to the threat posed by native-born blacks. As he was taken over by his passion and imagined me an ally in it, he began dropping words into his monologue that in his calmer moments he never would have used with me, words like “nigger” and “wetback” I had heard used only in rages and then only maybe twice before outside of a movie or TV show. And then, forgetting himself entirely, he allowed as how Jews were blocking the true story of our national decline.

It is not only inconvenient to hear words you might have spoken coming out of the mouth of a racist, nativist anti-Semite. It is also a reminder that ideas you hold dear may be used as weapons in a war you never intended to fight—a war in which those weapons may be turned against you just as my one-time colleague turned his assault on multiculturalism into an assault on Jews.

This is my warning as we consider the national prospect. Those who believe America is in a period of cultural decline are obviously correct; I am not at all sure how anyone of good will could argue otherwise.

And yet, and yet, and yet. It is one thing to worry over and battle against the dumbing-down of our schools; the assault on taste, standards, and truth posed by multiculturalism; the rise of repellent sexual egalitarianism; even the dangers of advanced consumerism are becoming increasingly worrisome.

But it is quite another thing to make the leap from that point to the notion that the nation itself is in parlous and irreversible decline. After all, nations are always in parlous moral health; nations are gatherings of people, and people are sinners. When the United States was putatively healthier, back in the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s, 12 percent of its population was living in de-facto or de-jure immiseration and the Wasp majority protected its position in the elite by means of explicit quotas and exclusions.

The declinists are both wrong and spiritually noxious. After all, the purpose of declaring the nation in decline is to root out the causes of the decline, extirpate them, and put the nation on the road to health. But, for some of them, the search for causes always leads to blacks, immigrants, and Jews. In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Harvard’s own Quentin Compson finds himself suicidal over America’s conversion into the “land of the kike home of the wop.”

Blacks and Jews are ever the inevitable, juicy target—so inevitable that they still find a link in the fevered minds of the paleo-Right, even though all blacks and Jews have in common now is the way the paleo-Right links them.

What blacks, Jews, and immigrants always seem to lack in the eyes of declinists is some version of the American character—that which my one-time colleague believed his father to have fought for. The dark underbelly of the American political experiment is the very idea of an American character itself. It is, fundamentally, an un-American idea. It is the nature of America that there is no one American character. Demography is not destiny in America as it is everywhere else; where you come from is not who you are.

I can find no quarrel with the brief of particulars offered by the declinists. But their central idea gives heart and strength to people whose threnodies can sound like the song of the siren—and must, like the siren’s song, be resisted by all strong men.

–Nov. 1, 1995

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